Max Boot
TAIPEI, Taiwan — It is both thrilling and sobering to visit Taiwan nearly a year after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
It’s inspiring to see the achievements of the Taiwanese people in building a flourishing democracy — the first in China’s long history — under the constant shadow of attack from the People’s Republic of China. Taipei is a vibrant city of 2.6 million people full of high-rise office and apartment buildings, shopping malls and “night markets,” beef noodle parlors and bubble tea shops. It is the capital of a de facto nation that is far freer and wealthier than the mainland (per capita gross domestic product is nearly three times higher). Taiwan, an island smaller than West Virginia with a population of just 23.5 million, produces more than 90 percent of the world’s most advanced semiconductors. While China is only now escaping the prison of President Xi Jinping’s misguided “zero covid” policy, Taiwan (which, unlike China, has used Western mRNA vaccines) has already returned to normal.
But it’s also dismaying to realize how quickly all of this could turn to ashes, as has happened to so many cities in Ukraine. Taiwan’s skyscrapers — including the iconic Taipei 101, one of the world’s tallest buildings — could all too readily become targets for the growing Chinese missile stockpile.
The threat is not, of course, new. Taiwan has been in the Communists’ crosshairs ever since Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek relocated his Nationalist government here in 1949. But the Russian attack on Ukraine has made it harder — if, sadly, far from impossible — to be in denial about the danger. You can no longer pretend that this sort of naked aggression cannot occur in the modern world. It is happening in Ukraine right now — and it could happen in Taiwan at some point in the near future, given Xi’s fixation on seizing control of what he regards as a renegade province. While many ordinary Taiwanese remain in denial, most of their leaders have awaked to the danger and are belatedly acting to avert it.
“We know the military threat against Taiwan is very serious,” Taiwan’s cerebral foreign minister, Joseph Wu, told me last week in the flawless English he perfected as a PhD student at Ohio State University. “We need to beef up our defense capability, knowing that China might attack at any time.”
If Taiwan needs any reminder of the threat, it comes from constant incursions by Chinese aircraft into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone, which nearly doubled in 2022 and continue at an alarming rate in the new year. Such incursions are designed to remind Taiwanese that they are at Beijing’s mercy and could serve as a rehearsal for a future attack.
Many Taiwanese count on the United States to come to its aid in the event of war, even though Washington has long maintained a policy of “strategic ambiguity” that makes it unclear if it would do so. (President Biden has repeatedly said U.S. military personnel would fight for Taiwan, but, just as often, his own administration has walked back his statements.)
No one knows, of course, what a future U.S. president might do in the event of war. But watching the war in Ukraine has convinced Taiwanese officials that to win international support, they need to display the ability and will to hold off the Communist onslaught by themselves, at least initially. “Defending Taiwan is our own responsibility,” Wu told me. “If Taiwan is not willing to demonstrate the will to defend itself, it has no right to ask any other country to defend Taiwan.”
Taiwan is responding to the growing danger by taking long overdue steps to build up its defenses. The government, led by President Tsai Ing-wen, is raising the defense budget for 2023 by 13.9 percent, expanding mandatory military service from four months to a year, and buying from the United States advanced weapons systems such as Harpoon anti-ship missiles, Stinger antiaircraft missiles and High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS).
But Taiwan, which is much smaller in area and population than Ukraine, still has a long way to go before it can credibly deter a military threat from an enemy that is far more populous and powerful than Russia. While Taiwan’s defense budget is growing, it is still only 2.4 percent of GDP — less than in the United States. And while conscripts will soon be serving longer periods in the military, they will still spend less time in uniform than draftees in Israel or South Korea.
Beyond spending more on defense and enlisting more service personnel, Taiwan must also transform its military. The Taiwanese armed forces have been very conventional in their outlook, relying on surface ships, tanks and fighter aircraft that would be unlikely to survive a Chinese missile barrage. At the urging of Washington, the Taiwanese are trying to reorient around an “asymmetric strategy” employing their own missiles to target a Chinese amphibious assault.
But that approach is still in its early stages, and some senior military officers are still resistant to it. Many of the systems that Taiwan wants from the United States, such as HIMARS and Stingers, could take years to arrive because the limited production capacity is being sent to Ukraine first. To my dismay, Taiwanese military officials told me that they are just starting to incorporate drones into their armed forces — and, while they are already building their own anti-ship missiles, air-defense missiles and submarines, they are only now discussing the production of military drones. A retired Taiwanese general told me that Taiwan should be intercepting Chinese warships in the Taiwan Straits not with its own warships, which are expensive to operate and vulnerable to attack, but with swarms of cheaper drones. But those drones don’t yet exist in Taiwan. By contrast, China has become the world’s biggest manufacturer of unmanned aerial systems.
Beyond the need for new hardware that will take years to arrive is the need for new training, new organizations and new doctrine to make the most effective use of all of these new systems. The United States should expand its efforts to train the Taiwanese military, as it trained the Ukrainian military after 2014, and consider including the Taiwanese in U.S. joint military exercises with other Pacific nations. But even if that were to occur, it won’t produce instant results.
“It takes time to deliver weapons and even longer for them to be operational,” former Taiwanese defense minister Andrew N.D. Yang told me. “We need to train professional soldiers and officers to be familiar with these new systems. It won’t be ready overnight. It could take another five or six years.”
The question is whether Taiwan will have that long to get ready. Taiwan and China are in a race to modernize their armed forces — and the better-funded People’s Liberation Army is winning. The CIA reports that, while Xi has not made the decision to attack, he wants the capacity to take over Taiwan by 2027. Taiwan’s defense minister says an invasion could come as soon as 2025. Taiwan will have to accelerate its buildup if it is to deter that threat — and the United States will have to mount its own buildup of forces in the Pacific.
Taiwanese officials and analysts are closely watching the war in Ukraine for signs of how they can defend their own land. They are cheered by the resistance of Ukrainian defenders. Wu’s office features a Ukrainian flag signed by Ukrainian warriors and boxing gloves signed by Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko (a former world boxing champion) — small tokens of thanks for more than $30 million in humanitarian aid that Taiwan has sent to Ukraine.
The Taiwanese reckon that Ukraine’s success in fighting the Russians and garnering international support should give Xi pause before launching a risky invasion of his own. But Xi could also draw an alarming lesson from the current war: Russia’s nuclear arsenal is deterring the United States from sending its own forces to aid Ukraine. Perhaps that means the United States won’t risk a war with nuclear-armed China over Taiwan’s fate?
Moreover, there is a critical difference between Ukraine and Taiwan: The former has secure supply lines with NATO members, while the latter is an island at risk of being cut off by a blockade. Taiwan needs to be prepared to withstand a lengthy siege but has not stockpiled nearly enough energy, food, medicine or ammunition. It has only about 10 days of natural gas supplies in reserve — and yet the ruling Democratic Progressive Party is stubbornly proceeding with plans to phase out Taiwan’s remaining nuclear power plants. Taiwan, which imports 98 percent of its energy supplies, should be expanding its nuclear power industry, not shuttering it.
Unfortunately, a lot of Taiwanese still don’t seem to grasp how perilous their situation is. An August poll, taken after menacing Chinese military drills in response to then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan, found that only 39 percent of Taiwanese adults said a war was very or somewhat likely, while 53 percent said it is not very likely or totally unlikely. Taiwan is starting to wake from its slumber — but some of its people would still prefer to hit the snooze button.
Their attitude reminds me of many Ukrainians, including President Volodymyr Zelensky, who denied right up until the last moment that Russians would actually invade. While the Ukrainians have proved themselves to be stout and skilled defenders, they failed to deter an aggressor and thus to avert a war that is now ravaging their country. That is a mistake Taiwan must not make. Taipei has made a good start toward rebuilding its defenses, which atrophied after the end of martial law and the Cold War in the 1990s, but it still has a long way to go — and not much time to get there.
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